Right now, there are roughly 800,000 physicians in the United States of America.
Approximately 25,000 physicians complete their medical training every year.
To keep abreast of current medical demands, the U.S. each year requires about 30,000 new physicians.
Now take 40 million uninsured and dump them into this system, and do you know what you get?
Rationing.
There’s simply no way around it, all democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, wishful-thinking propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
Writes Robert M. Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest:
I am not worried about death panels or plugs being pulled. I am worried about expanding government power about what to pay doctors, how to allocate care and telling me (and my doctor) something is ineffective, wasteful or unnecessary treatment.
That’s government rationing. And it will happen.
Both House health and Senate bills require 20 million Americans to use Medicaid for health care coverage. That doubles the number of people on Medicaid while reducing Medicaid’s already low reimbursement rate. Cutting Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals to subsidize the health premiums of Generation X-ers who can afford to pay for healthcare but don’t leads to rationing.
The White House and Democrats have the gall to respond there is rationing by private insurance companies. Yes, companies use what is known as comparative effectiveness research (CER) to decide what new technologies to pay for. By ignoring individual differences and information from the real world, CER studies wind up showing that there is no benefit to any new treatments most of the time.
There is also rationing by government agencies such as Medicaid and the VA system. Yes Medicare. All using CER.
Forget about grandma for a second. How about the kids? (Robert M. Goldberg, “Facts Are Not Distortion“)
And then there’s this recent jaw-dropper from Google News:
Overhauling health-care system tops agenda at annual meeting of Canada’s doctors
By Jennifer Graham (CP)
SASKATOON — The incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says this country’s health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.
Dr. Anne Doig says patients are getting less than optimal care and she adds that physicians from across the country - who will gather in Saskatoon on Sunday for their annual meeting - recognize that changes must be made.
“We all agree that the system is imploding, we all agree that things are more precarious than perhaps Canadians realize,” Doing said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
“We know that there must be change,” she said. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”
The pitch for change at the conference is to start with a presentation from Dr. Robert Ouellet, the current president of the CMA, who has said there’s a critical need to make Canada’s health-care system patient-centred. He will present details from his fact-finding trip to Europe in January, where he met with health groups in England, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and France.
His thoughts on the issue are already clear. Ouellet has been saying since his return that “a health-care revolution has passed us by,” that it’s possible to make wait lists disappear while maintaining universal coverage and “that competition should be welcomed, not feared.”
In other words, Ouellet believes there could be a role for private health-care delivery within the public system….
“(Canadians) have to understand that the system that we have right now - if it keeps on going without change - is not sustainable,” said Doig.
Jaw-dropper, I say, not because it wasn’t obvious, but because a mainstream media outlet actually reported on it.
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This entry was posted by rayharvey on Monday; August 17th, 2009 at 2:36 am and is filed under Fact Of The Day, Health Care, Tea Parties.
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Your article states: “Writes Robert M. Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest: I am not worried about death panels or plugs being pulled. I am worried about expanding government power about what to pay doctors, how to allocate care and telling me (and my doctor) something is ineffective, wasteful or unnecessary treatment. That’s government rationing. And it will happen.
Emanuel knew at least as early as 1988 that Advanced Directives and how they really give power to the doctors to make end of life happen sooner. The following is a 2003 article:
Gregory W. Rutecki, M.D.
rutecki_an_evangelical_critique_of_advance_directives.php
Emanuel 29 followed nursing home patients for two years after the completion of an advance directive. After medical record review and physician interview, the authors concluded that in many cases the patient’s choices were overridden because their physician disagreed with the wisdom of their choice. On occasion, the override represented the withholding of treatment because the physician decided it would not benefit the patient. End-of-life choices through vaguely worded advance directives may be primarily relegated to physicians who lack a consensus about what it means to be human”. “With increasing governmental and third party intrusion into the contemporary contract model of medical care, will advance directives become a coercive tool that rations end-of-life care by offering euthanasia as a cheaper alternative to life?”
29. op. cit., Emanuel, E.J., et al., 1988.
That’s good information, HonestWithPeople. Thank you. I give you five stars — and would give you more if I could.